Yes of course you CAN, question is would you want to spend that amount of time. Tracking multiple parts of the frame as they move sounds awefully tedious and lets face it with say 8 layers of composite you're looking at what playback rate? 0.01 fps? If this was just a few seconds of video then fine, I'm talking 45 minutes of footage and this was just a one camera shoot, next one same location, same lighting disaster will be multiple cameras.

Bob.

When I do color correcting in AE 6.5, I have found that Color Finesse is excellent. I dont know if they have a stand alone prog or if they are just plugins for Premiere Pro, AE, and Avid. Its definitely worth a shot.

I had a look at Color Finesse but it doesn't seem to do anymore than what Vegas does.
Bob.

I used to use Vixen as well as Color Finesse. An early version of Vixen had pre sets for things like tungsten and florescent and for some reason in the later versions they did not have them...or I "lost" them somewhere along the way. Vixen seems to have died out now that most of the NLE's they developed for all have built in CC now. A "Son of DaVinci" for Vegas would be pretty damn cool - and pretty damn expensive no doubt.

well you can do this in eyon fusion as is - or add plug ins (you can also use almost all AE plugin also)

but the cost isnt cheap either -- but ...... makes vegas look like even more of bargin than it already is .

everything of course with tracking and 8 , 10 , 16 and floating bit color space:

Color Correction
The new color corrector has been widely acclaimed for traditional color manipulation and offers ease-of-design functionality.

· Adjust hue, saturation, tinting, gamma, gain, contrast, brightness for any color channel or luminance range.
· Manipulate levels and image histogram directly.
· Separate color correction by channel or region, or use masks to restrict effect.
· User definable ranges for shadows, midtones and highlights.
· Rotate image hue to correct image errors or apply dramatic effect.
· Color match to a reference image.
· Snapshot and freeze image histograms for stable, flicker-free color matching between plates.
· Suppress a specified color or colors from the image.
· Spline-based Color Curves tool allows look-up-table color correction for infinite flexibility.
· Work in RGB, YUV, CMY and other color spaces using the Color Space tool.
· Use logarithmic images like Cineon and DPT without first converting them to linear space.
· A/B split wipe allows simultaneous display of separate images for quick comparisons.
· Channel Booleans to copy and blend image channels based on add, subtract, multiply and other mathematical operations. Includes support for operations on auxiliary channels like · Z-buffer, and uv mapping co-ordinates.

Anybody tried 6cc? Free six-vector color corrector for Vegas.

Description:
6cc is a basic "six-vector" secondary color corrector, allowing you to adjust the color spectrum using six "vectors" or "channels": Reds, Greens, Blues, Cyans, Magentas and Yellows.

Vegas already has a secondary color corrector, but it lacks a true six-vector function. 6cc does the job it's designed for with much less effort, and at much faster rendering rates.

Directly adjust Reds, Greens, Blues, Cyans, Magentas and Yellows without having to "pick" the colors. All six color vectors can be adjusted independently using only one instance of the plugin. (Sony's secondary corrector would require up to SIX instances!)

Currently allows Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL) adjustment.

Invert your selection to adjust everything but a certain channel.

32-bit floating-point precision used internally for high quality (accelerated by SSE/3DNow!).

See 6cc.

Ah yes, I forgot about tracking if you have a lot of motion in the frame.

None of these tools do anything different to what can already be done with the six vector CC plus the secondary CC tools in Vegas. They are more than adequate. BUT they work on the whole frame!
If in the one frame I've got two subjects, one lit daylight and the other tungsten in front of a white wall casting shadow that intersect there's no color correction tool that's going to solve the problem without a lot of dynamic masking. That's what I'm after.
I've had this problem even grading film thats gone off. Simple example, snow turns blue, CC can get my snow white again but multiple shadows from trees are a different color entirely. I need to be able to easily define those areas in the frame and apply a different color correction to them. Yes I've tried doing that with secondary CC, but just looking at the mask I can tell straight away I'm also affecting other areas in the frame that are now correct.
Yes, I could render out the mask only, rotoscope it to remove the bits I don't want affected etc but boy that's a lot of work for a few seconds of film!
I'm not expecting any cheap solution to this, I see quotes for color grading at $3K / day and even that doesn't seem to offer what I'm after.
Maybe I'm expecting too much, just surprised someone hasn't come up with a system that addresses this or maybe anyone with enough money to afford it would have shot the show in a studio in the first place and avoided the problem by doing it right to start with!
Bob.

the app i mentioned before does CC by region or subject and also has tracking

but it is more a compositing tool - like shake

B_JM,
thanx. Looks very powerful and no doubt pricey. Should have a system that'll do it justice next week to give the demo a spin.

Bob.

nice thing about that program is -- you can just buy parts of it - which make it very reasonable ..
and you can mix and match and even purchase time limited lic for just one feature .... it is a very good way of doing business .. you can set up a heck of render farm also - and really slug through a lot of data ... but this program eats system memory like there is no tomorrow ..

I usually end up using the color corrector along with the color curves. It seems to make a very large difference on some poor videos of which I am most familiar. I wouldn't know what to do with a super good video.

JJK